IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, who chairs the Select Committee, knows and recognises that having a commitment to reduce intensity is really a commitment to improve efficiency; it does not mean that less carbon dioxide will be going into the atmosphere. Does he agree?

[Mr Yeo]

Of course, that distinction is absolutely accurate, but it is also the case that China has said that it will see a peak in its carbon emissions, and it is suggested that that will happen in 2030. My observation of China and of the culture there is that if a target of that sort is set publicly and becomes the official policy, it is done in the Chinese Government’s absolutely certain knowledge that they will achieve that target and probably improve on it by several years. I would guess that we will reach a period within the next 15 years when China’s emissions stop going up and start to come down.

As Sir David King, the former Government chief scientific adviser and now adviser to the Foreign Secretary, said, the announcement by the US and China makes the possibility of an international carbon emissions pact “very likely”. I agree with that assessment, particularly when we see the progress—I will come back to this later —on emissions trading systems, investment in renewables and so on, and not just in China.

Last month, equally importantly in my view, the EU agreed a 40% target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels for 2030. That was, of course, exactly the outcome that the British Government were working towards and they deserve great credit for securing that outcome. They have got the target for overall carbon emissions to be reduced without having that overlain with what in my view are less rational targets for specific progress on renewables. It leaves countries free to decide how they are going to decarbonise their economies. That was exactly the right approach, and it is the approach that the British Government had taken a lead in fighting for. As the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change said:

“This is a historic moment. Europe has sent a clear and firm message to the world that ambitious climate action is needed now.”

The Prime Minister spoke at the UN climate summit in New York on 23 September and pointed out that the British Government are keeping their promise to be the greenest Government ever. I know that some critics say that that is not actually being achieved, but the truth is that the decision alone to confirm the fourth carbon budget from 2023 to 2027 was of great significance. Although there are lots of areas where we would like the UK to be going further and faster, that commitment alone—again, I will come back to carbon budgeting—strongly supports the claim to be the greenest Government ever.

The UK has more than doubled the capacity of the renewable energy industry in generating electricity in the last four years. That is a substantial achievement and a vindicator of the kind of incentives that have been put in place for investment in renewables. As we know, the UK has also played an important role internationally with its carbon finance commitments. However, we need the whole world to step up if we are going to deliver a deal that keeps the target of a maximum rise in average temperatures of 2° centigrade within reach. That is a big part of the agenda as we move towards the Paris COP—the conference of the parties to the UN framework convention on climate change—at the end of next year. Above all, we need to make sure that policies are in place that give business the certainty that it needs to make investments in low-carbon technology. As the Prime Minister said,

“we need a framework built on green growth not green tape.”

We will need a good outcome from Paris next year, and a lot of work remains to be done to achieve that.

It is worth looking now at what the IPCC has done. It was set up in 1988 to provide assessments of the latest peer-reviewed climate science for policy makers. The fifth assessment report, which has come out in various stages for more than a year now, is the most recent output—in fact, the very most recent was the synthesis report published at the start of this month.

Overall, the fifth assessment report was the culmination of seven years of academic research—literally thousands of scientific papers and reports. There were three working group reports, and, of course, a lot of inter-Government negotiation as well. The most recent synthesis report concluded:

“Human influence on the climate system is clear”.

It also stated:

“Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”

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[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

It is worth understanding what is meant when we talk about the scientific basis for climate change. Essentially, if the climate is changing, it is because the energy budget of this planet is altering. We are taking in more energy than we are radiating as a planet. There is no direct way of measuring that process, so we have to look at indirect measurement, which leads us into a number of difficulties. One only has to think about the ice ages to realise that the climate has always changed. There is natural variation, and if the planet is taking in more energy than it is radiating, that will inevitably lead to climate change that is not a natural variation.

As Professor Trewavas has said, there is not a scientist on the planet who can measure and distinguish between natural climate variation and anthropogenic climate variation, so we are in serious difficulty when we talk about the scientific basis of climate change. That has become an area of great controversy and enthusiasm from certain parties. I am—or at least I was—a scientist. As I have debated science in this place and elsewhere, I have come to the conclusion that science and politics are a bad mix, and that one tends to contaminate the other. Science is about the search for truth. Good scientists, if they are proved wrong, will shout, “Alleluia!” because they are pleased that the boundaries of knowledge have been pushed further. Politics is about winning the argument; it is about my side beating the other side.

Unfortunately, in the debate around climate change, some politicians and so-called non-governmental organisations have distorted the science and pushed arguments in a non-scientific way. A current example of that—it is not immediately to do with climate change although it could be—is the case of Professor Anne Glover, the former scientific adviser to the President of the European Commission. She has just failed to get her contract renewed because she took a view on genetically modified foods that Greenpeace and other groups did not like, and those groups lobbied to remove scientific advice from the Commission.

I think we will see that various activist groups have behaved in a similar way in the discussion about climate change. Because of that, I proposed a number of amendments to the Energy and Climate Change Committee report, which fell into three categories. The first was about the political nature of the report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced. The second was about what passes for science, given the problem I talked about before of direct measurement of the planet’s energy balance and climate change. The third was about the consequences for this country’s energy policy.

Donna Laframboise provided a lot of written and oral evidence to the Committee about the political nature of the IPCC. In drawing up the final report, representatives of 100 Governments met in secret for a four-day session. They changed the report, reducing it by 700 words and increasing the number of pages. Astonishingly, given that the report was supposed to be based on science, they reverse-engineered it to make it consistent with a summary that was a series of political compromises, where words were put up on whiteboards and crossed out according to the agreement or lack of agreement between the representatives of the different countries.

That leads me to two conclusions. Why should an intergovernmental process that produces policies that may lead to trillions of pounds of expenditure around the globe take place in private? It should not. Why should a summary of a scientific subject be produced by Governments rather than by scientists? The IPCC claims that it is a scientific body, but it is not. It is an intergovernmental body that reaches compromises, just as politicians reach compromises. I would scrap the IPCC and move to a science-based body that published summaries of current climate science more frequently.

[Ian Lavery]

Is my hon. Friend suggesting that he has no confidence whatsoever in the IPCC’s recommendations?

[Graham Stringer]

I would answer my hon. Friend in two ways. First, I would not detract from the basic scientific papers that lie underneath the report. Those papers are produced, by and large, by reputable scientists who are doing their best in a difficult area. Secondly, I ask him to consider the fact that the most significant, headline conclusion was that we should have more confidence in the IPCC’s conclusions now than we did previously. However, its prediction about global temperature increasing over the past 13 or 14 years has been wrong; it did not predict a flattening of the temperature curve. It is strange to conclude, when it has got something so badly wrong, that we should have more confidence in its results, and I do not. To say that I had no confidence would be very strong if that was based on decent scientists doing decent work, but I argue that the process is seriously flawed. That is the IPCC.

Staying with the science for a moment, one of the amendments that I proposed to the Select Committee report was to say that we do not really have 97% consensus that we are heading towards catastrophic climate change. I base that, although there are other areas that we can look at, on Robin Guenier’s evidence to the Committee. He carried out a survey of all the reports that consider the views of climate scientists, and he concluded:

“In summary, the inadequacy of useful evidence means that the extent to which the SPM reflects climate scientists’ views is both unknown and likely to continue to be unknown.”

That is because there has not been a decent survey.

“Therefore it’s impossible to provide a reliable answer to the Committee’s question.”

That question was whether there was a consensus.

“However, such evidence as does exist indicates that the answer would probably be that AR5 reflects the range of views among climate scientists to only a very limited extent.”

That partly answers my hon. Friend’s question.

The regularly cited figure of 97% consensus comes from a report by Cook based on an old survey of about 12,000 pieces of scientific literature. Cook looked at the literature, and if a scientist stated that they believed carbon dioxide to be a greenhouse gas, he claimed the paper in support of the consensus that catastrophic global warming is happening, which is a non sequitur—it clearly is not the case. When we look at the other papers surveyed by Guenier, which I can list if necessary, there are various views from different scientists and groups of scientists. No survey can be absolutely categorical about the views of climate scientists, but when those views are assessed, they certainly do not come out anywhere near 97% consensus that catastrophic global warming or climate change is happening. We can put that to one side.

If we look at where we are left with the science, given the previous problems, we have to consider climate models, because we cannot directly measure the planet’s energy balance. Some of the evidence given to the Committee seriously criticises the climate models. At the time of the report, the Committee did not have the views of Steven Koonin, an adviser to President Obama’s Government who is a specialist in such computer programs. He goes through in great detail where the problems are in the computer models. He points out that the resolution of the computer models is 60 miles, and there can be many types of weather and weather changes in a grid 60 miles square. To work out what is happening, the models start with basic figures and then begin guessing, and it is no better than guessing because they have to work out the average cloud cover based on the humidity and changes in temperature over such large areas, which have huge variations. Basically, the situation can be fiddled within the grid. By and large, the temperature changes over the past 100 years or so vary in such models by factors of three. That does not prove that one of the models is right, because some 55 models are being used out there, but it does show that there is no consistent modelling.

Do the models allow us to predict or understand what is happening? They predict the reduction in the Arctic ice cover but not the increase in Antarctic ice, which probably outweighs the reduction in ice at the north pole. The models do not predict the completely even rise in sea levels over the past 100 years—the rise has consistently been about 1 foot a century for some time. The models predict that the surface temperature in the tropics should increase, but it has not. There are many serious problems with the models, and one has to realise that there are fiddle factors.

The Chairman and other members of the Committee are convinced that the models are the basis on which we should predicate the whole of our energy policy. Our energy policy is to put up the price of fuel for the people I represent, and they are some of the poorest people in this country. We are trying to hit emissions targets on carbon dioxide, and at the same time we are deindustrialising the country, so we are not putting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; we are putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That policy—I do not want to overuse the word “catastrophe”—has perverse consequences. If people genuinely believe that carbon dioxide will lead to a global catastrophe, we should not be pursuing the policies that we are now pursuing. The drive for renewables, where there are indications that current research may lead to better renewables in future, is putting the security of our energy supply at risk. So the three key factors of the Government’s energy policy, based on many of the IPCC’s conclusions, are perverse.

I lost the votes on the amendments that I proposed to the Committee—I often lose votes, which I do not mind because that is the nature of politics—but I ask my hon. Friends and Government Members to address the points. There simply is not a 97% consensus. We are responsible for putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and there is a great deal that we do not know about what is happening in the atmosphere.

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[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

Mr Betts, I also have to apologise to you for my late arrival this afternoon, and in particular for my inability to hear the contribution to the debate of the Chair of our Select Committee. Nevertheless I predict, although not with absolute certainty, with a fairly high level of certainty that I will probably agree with him in what I say.

I was detained in coming to this important debate by a discussion I was having on Japanese knotweed; to be precise, it was a discussion on Radio 2. On arriving here, I was thinking that perhaps Japanese knotweed is not such an awful metaphor for our debate today, inasmuch as it is here, there is a considerable amount of disagreement about its effect and there is a lot of scientific activity going on at the moment to try to clarify and qualify that effect, including studies to see what insects predate on Japanese knotweed. And there is some uncertainty about whether the effects of insects on Japanese knotweed are real, and about whether “urgent” action needs to be taken, or just “reasonably urgent” action, or “not very much action at all”. So there is quite a lot of debate about Japanese knotweed.

However, what we do know, with a reasonably high degree of certainty, is that Japanese knotweed is very invasive; it uproots our houses and properties, and needs to be dealt with. Indeed, if a surveyor came along to me if I was attempting to deal with my house repairs and said, “It’s very likely that Japanese knotweed is undermining the foundations of your house,” I probably would not say, “I’m not going to do anything about this, because I want to wait until I know that it’s extremely likely that it is undermining the foundations of my house. So I will just let the stuff get on with it until I am absolutely certain, on scientific grounds, that it is extremely likely that my house will be done over.” Instead, I would probably say, “Well, ‘very likely’ is pretty much good enough for me. I’m going to do something about this, and get my house sorted out.”

That in particular was why I intervened on the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) during his contribution, which was about the difference between the fourth assessment report and the fifth assessment report on the degree of likelihood. While it is true that there has been a change between those two reports in what the guide for policy makers is indicating in terms of just how great a degree of emergency we face as far as the effects of anthropogenic global warming are concerned, the assessment has indeed moved from “very likely” to “extremely likely”. As I have underlined, even if someone did not really think that “extremely likely” was absolutely the starting point for taking any further action, they might be rather alarmed by what has happened previously.

What I then worry about is those people who look at the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, just as the Select Committee has done, and who start to raise concerns about it in the way that we have heard today. It is not that those concerns are illegitimate or necessarily entirely out of court, in terms of discussion. However, after that we have to say, “What might some of those concerns amount to, depending on how they are depicted, as important or otherwise, to what is—as IPCC’s fifth assessment report is—a transition of a series of scientific documents, discussions and conclusions, into a document that has some relevance as far as policy makers are concerned?” Indeed, that is precisely the equivalent of a discussion on the science of Japanese knotweed and the surveyor’s report.

[Graham Stringer]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be better if scientists summarised the science, not politicians?

[Dr Whitehead]

It is better that a report produced for policy purposes is a synthesis of what scientists and others are saying and concluding. Indeed, that is exactly what our report concluded.

Beyond that, we then come not to the question of what concerns there might be about some of the detail of the fifth assessment report and its policy summary, but to one important element of scientific method. I should say that I am a social scientist, not a scientist scientist, but I certainly would always have regard to scientific method in my researches and thoughts on a matter, and would be pretty much guided by scientific method and principles of probability and various other things such as those. The important element is that there are always outliers in any scientific discussion. How could it be otherwise? That is what science is about. Science is never unanimous. Indeed, the whole of scientific method is to take something that looks unanimous and test it to destruction and see whether a new consensus emerges from that—and that in turn is tested. There are always outliers and always people who are testing science, and always people who will disagree with a conclusion.

In terms of what science does in informing policy makers, the question is how to best get to the best science that there is, currently, to inform something that will not have 100% certainty behind it but which is, as I have described in terms of what people do about their house, an imperative that they may have to act on, without 100% certainty, but with a high degree of probability behind their actions. That is essentially what the IPCC fifth assessment report is about.

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[Dr Whitehead]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. He will recall that I said that it sounded to me a little bit like that was the direction in which some of the contributions might be moving. I do not personally accuse the right hon. Gentleman of taking that position. However, a number of other people—not he—have taken and do take that position and it seems to me that they are, as a result, hopelessly adrift in terms of what we might or might not do.

[Graham Stringer]

I hope that my hon. Friend does not mean me. I hope I made it quite clear that, as far as I am concerned, the scientific papers are produced—unless evidence shows they are not—by scientists of integrity. Where the problem lies is that representatives of Governments take a large amount of that science and reach political compromises, which is bad for the production of a document. That should be done by scientists, because they would produce a different document. Because they represent the view of their Government, Government representatives stop information from those scientific papers getting into the report. That is not a conspiracy; that is political process.

[Dr Whitehead]

My hon. Friend sets out a process that seems remarkably similar to every single bit of policy work that ever takes place anywhere in the world on pretty much anything. There is a scientific process and if scientists wish to inform policy makers who are involved in that process, those policy makers will be involved in a process that is less than perfect in relation to what the science says. It is a combination of what is possible, what the policy is that is informed by the scientific process and, most importantly, whether the policy makers should wait for the science to be absolutely perfect before they do anything. My hon. Friend is coming close to saying that unless the science is perfect and scientists can have a sign-off on absolutely everything that goes on to the desk of the last policy maker, we should do nothing.

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[Graham Stringer]

My hon. Friend is being generous with his time. The British Government do not follow the same process as the IPCC when it comes to scientific advice. The Government have a scientific adviser who gives independent advice to the Cabinet and the Prime Minister. Each Department has a scientific adviser and specialist committees. They do not wait until there is certainty; they produce the best available science at the time and Ministers take decisions on that advice. If the IPCC followed that process, I would be a much happier person, but it does not do that. It introduces politicians into the scientific process. That is where it goes wrong, and that is not describing a conspiracy.

[Dr Whitehead]

My hon. Friend describes the sort of process at an international level that to some extent goes on in Her Majesty’s Government. The document that he refers to, which was referred to by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, is headed, guide for policy makers. It does not purport to be the scientific document. The scientific documents, as we have agreed, are elsewhere.